Tag: Automation

With a graduate degree in business, and 20 years of experience in IT, I am often frustrated to see these two organizations at odds with one another. While it is nearly impossible to conduct business, today, without IT…IT does not exist just to make pretty lights blink in the data center. IT exists to serve the business and to ultimately aid the business in achieving their goals. These should be complimentary goals, not contrary ones.

For the IT strategists and engineers that “get” this concept, there are two core technologies that you need to be exploring. The first is automation, and the second is orchestration. Automation will make routing processes more reliable and their outcomes more predictable. Automation is not easy. It can often be much more difficult to automate a task then to simply execute the steps individually, but the outcome is more valuable.

The second concept, orchestration, is where IT and the business meet. With orchestration, you add intelligence to automation, allowing tasks to be triggered by predefined conditions. These can be technological conditions or even business conditions.

To end 2013, I wrote a two part series on these topics for TechTarget. The first article is “Car assembly plants can teach a valuable lesson in IT automation“, dealing with automation and a great experience I had at a GM plant. The second article is “IT orchestration can help bridge gaps to unite divided business units“, building on the previous work on automation.

I hop that you will take a minute to read these articles, and then come back here and leave a comment to let me know what you think.

In these times of lean staffing budgets, some IT professionals are hesitant of diving too deep into a new automation tool, worried they could actually automate themselves out of a job.

I came into technology as a Perl programmer and UNIX administrator. I spent years writingcommon gateway interfaces for websites and automating routine tasks. As I moved along in my career, the ability to script and automate tasks was one of my top priorities when interviewing prospective employees. In my opinion, the ability to leverage an automation tool is a sign of a mature engineer. So why are so many people hesitant to embrace automation tools?

An automation tool can be anything from a scripting language to an application that allows you to build a workflow of tasks to be executed as a single action. Some tools are easy to learn, and others are a little more daunting to master. However, it may not be the learning curve that keeps many people from leveraging these tools. While some may simply not appreciate thevalue of automation, others are truly apprehensive about the end result. Some fear that if they can do their job in half the time, they or one of their co-workers may no longer be necessary. That could not be further from the truth.

I cannot remember anyone automating themselves out of a job. Gaining valuable skills only makes you more valuable, not less. I love this topic, and I take a deeper look at it in my article “Don’t fear an automation tool — it may be your best bet at job security“.